Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Hey hey, it's a your mom joke! God, I haven't seen one of these guys in....years? Has it really been years? Man, this is making me nostalgic. Crack open a can of your-mom jokes, toss in some that's-what-she-saids, maybe pass around a bowl of "....-in-bed!"s. Have us a real good middle-school night.

And it's not even a good your-mom joke. The first thing that would come to my mind for a Lincoln's Mom comic would be "A house divided against itself cannot stand? More like...YOUR MOM cannot stand!" But this is just...dumb.

I know that some people will say that's the point, that's why he says Douglas's skills "entered a rapid decline." But that's a pretty cheap trick: Just because you say your joke is lame doesn't make the joke any less lame.

Also: referencing a really good webcomic, namely Kate Beaton's Hark: A Vagrant(known to all as simply "Kate Beaton" or "Kate Beaton's History Comics") doesn't make you seem any more cool. Ms. Beaton, for her part, made this twitter in response to the mention, she sounds real excited pretty annoyed about the whole thing.

Oh and fun fact randall, I know you said your joke is innaccurate but I would remiss if I did not point out that indeed its premise is also inaccurate; the Lincoln-Douglas debates were held in 1858 and were for Illinois's Senate election, an election which Douglas won, not lost. JUST SAYIN.

==============Heads up: Next week, as a reward for putting together the xkcdsucks book, Person #1 will be guest posting on Monday and Wednesday, and then Kirk will be doing it on Friday. I will leave it to P#1 to post a copy of the xkcdsucks book so you all can read it.

Posted by
Carl

101 comments:

Oh well, at least more people will be reading Kate Beaton, which can't be a bad thing.

Tornado comic: I thought it was cute, clever, although I'd be confused as fuck if I hadn't read the title first. Also: Seriously, Randall? An entire panel after the punchline? Half the dialogue is after the punchline. It's better than the Lincoln one, though, so there's that.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think Kate Beaton's comic sucks. The artwork is awful, and while about one out of ten jokes is good, half of them are "Ha ha historical people speak gangsta!" and the remaining 40% are "Ha ha lots of swearing but no joke."

While today's XKCD is pretty cute if you ignore the last panel, there's definitely something weird about that art, like anon 12:14 said. Is is the fat lines and the squigglyness?

I'm not quite sure that the newest comic is the kind of thing that works in xkcd; it only seems humourous if I already expected an absurd, nonsensical joke a la Cyanide & Happiness, and xkcd doesn't quite fit that style. Besides, the execution is not that good: it's as if the third panel, which IS the punchline, is not "supposed" to be the joke itself, so that extra panel tries to make something "intellectual" out of mindless humour. In short, it pretty much misses the point. It COULD have been a pretty great strip, though.

Todays xkcd, well for one the art threw me off. I wouldn't call it worse, just unusual. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I actually kind of like the smudgyness of it. Oh well.

The joke, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, I realized they were tornado hunters, but I admittingly wasn't quite sure what happened in panel 3, because having already glimpsed at panel 4 I thought the person holding the tornado was the one they shot at, which confused me until I read the comic again, realizing what was going on for reals.

I didn't think it was funny, but that might just be because I had to read it twice

YOU LOOZERS HOW CAN YOU MAKE THIS BLOG UNLESS YOU HAVE NO LIFES YOU SPEND ALL YOUR TIME CRITICIZING RANDALL MUNROE WHO IS A TALENTED FUNNY AND GENIOUS MAN WELL YOUR ALL JUST JEALOUS BECAUSE HE GETS TO HAVE SEX WITH MEGAN AND YOUR ALL STILL VIRGINS WHO LIVE WITH YOUR MOM AND JACK OFF TOO PORN

LOL!!! you guys must all be liberal arts majors if you don't think xkcd is funny. maybe you should be practicing how to say "would you like fries with that?" instead of spending all your time ragging on something you obviously don't understand.

Yeah, because there's no way a liberal arts major would be capable of comprehending a historical references - they should stick to their physics and engineering and leave history to the science majors.

Maybe if they took time out from their "dadaism in cinema" and "feminism in 18th century russian poetry" to read a real history book, but it seems like they'd rather waste their time bitching on the internet

Roger Ebert may not have made any good movies but he was smart enough to call out Ben Stein's ridiculous creationism video. He is fighting ignorance, all you ppl are doing is creating more of it. way to go

Oh give me a break, Randal Monroe travels the country giving speeches, he wrote a book, and draws a comic three times a week, of course its not going to be 100% accurate all the time. Maybe if you had even 1% of his success you'd have better things to do than pick apart every little detail of what he says.

Huh... it's been a while since I saw the last rabid fan comment... what, did the xkcdsucks book thing actually reach the fandom?

Oh, and yes, comic 639 is still stupid. It's an overly long gag -- a "your mom" joke, no less -- with an inaccurate caption. Randall draws stick figures and not much else, for whatever's sake, it can't be that hard to do some research with the time he's not spending improving his art.

Douglas did lose to Lincoln in the 1860 election for president. Douglas ran on one of the Democratic tickets, Lincoln ran on the other. The premise is inaccurate in that Douglas was dead when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address and was not there to heckle, which he was clearly doing, which I guess is the final degradation of debating.

My point is that he didn't present a debate, he presented a person who was terrible at debate heckling someone. So, their famous debates in the past are irrelevant to criticism of accuracy.

This did seem like a pretty transparent ripoff of the wikipedia protester. Same crowd, same no-speeching speech guy and a heckler in the crowd. It's nearly the same premise, except one is a your-mom joke, one was clever.

"Every time I read an XKCD comic I feel like I just watched a guy masturbate to Kitty Pryde and then pat himself on the back for it. Alternately you can interpret this as a compliment and go "oooh, she said my work reminds her of Joss Whedon!" "

I just found this blog and have read through it a bit (and don't feel like making an account to comment), it seems that the biggest problem with this blog is one you deny in the very first question of your sucks hugely FAQ.

Quite frankly, you do not get the joke. I am not saying that this is the case in every one of your postings, however, I have repeatedly read joke interpretations that seem so foolish that it seems you must be trying to misinterpret the joke intentionally.

In this posting, for example, you suggest that the core of the joke is the your mom joke, while the caption underneath is simply to excuse Randall from actually having to write anything funny. However, what you fail to understand is that the joke is all in the caption. There could be any number of Gettysburg Address your mom jokes that could fill in Douglas's text-box. So yes, your mom jokes are for Middle Schoolers, but thats exactly the point.

This comic is simply diving into the absurd. It takes a ridiculous idea (from a standpoint grounded in both fact and simple common sense), and lets it play out. One of the key tenants of humor is the unexpected- and one would certainly not expect a famous debator to reduce himself to such juvenille (and period innapropriate) tactics. The other main comedic device used is understatement, as I would say Douglas had undergone something slightly more serious than a decline if he was reducded to shouting your mom jokes in the middle of a solem address.

And by the way, you might be interested in checking out who ran for president in 1860. You might learn something.

"This comic is simply diving into the absurd. It takes a ridiculous idea (from a standpoint grounded in both fact and simple common sense), and lets it play out. One of the key tenants of humor is the unexpected- and one would certainly not expect a famous debator to reduce himself to such juvenille (and period innapropriate) tactics. The other main comedic device used is understatement, as I would say Douglas had undergone something slightly more serious than a decline if he was reducded to shouting your mom jokes in the middle of a solem address."

"In this posting, for example, you suggest that the core of the joke is the your mom joke, while the caption underneath is simply to excuse Randall from actually having to write anything funny. However, what you fail to understand is that the joke is all in the caption."

Of course it's a pretty convenient way to interpret the strip: "the joke is in the caption". The thing about Carl's reviews is not that he's trying to intentionally misinterpret the joke (I also had the same impression when I got here the first time -- now take a look at my posts!), but the scepticism that builds up as the strips get more and more mediocre leads you to see the comics differently. And knowing the recent history of jokes, it seems perfectly clear that it was the "your mom" joke that came first, not the "concept" of the comic. He thought up the joke, though it was worth using, created the (completely absurd and pointless) historical context for it and slammed the finished result onto paper.

And EVEN if I try to think the joke as a surreal commentary on Douglas, it's just pointless. There's hardly any relevance to it. It's not clever, there's no wit in it -- it's just a "hey, what if I take a very well known and common figure and SUBVERTED IT???" concept, which isn't at all novel and needs a VERY good execution. It's not too far from a "hey, what if I pretended Hitler didn't kill himself and actually became a 'cupcakes and puppies' pacifist after the war?" joke -- it's insubstantial, and filling it in with a "your mom" joke does nothing at all. Yeah, I also fell on Godwin's Law, I don't care.

So, my pre-review comment on the comic of Wednesday... the joke is cool, not extraordinary, but not horrible, either. The alt-text is either a failed joke("F" = "EF", phonetically? Just... that?) or an unfunny lecture. Eyes rolled, but no bigger damage. My biggest complain: the art.

Randall actually manages to make some nice shots in 2nd and 3rd panels, but his art is actually getting worse. I mean... in that last panel the hunter is thicker and the lines are irritantly "squiggly". And there's more of it around, the truck on the second panel is strangely out of place. The depiction of the shot on the third panel looks good, but it's barely redeeming. Really, I didn't think a stick figure comic could look bad, but Randall apparently is taking his effort on doing the opposite of improving.

Yes Carl... I read the post I'm commenting on. I was simply noting that the joke works even though the debate occured in 1858. There is absolutely no reason we cannot assume (in the universe presented in this joke at the very least), that the humiliation of losing a national election to a person you had won a debate against two years prior, could cause someone to become increasingly juvenille in their tactics.

Now, instead of seeing this joke as Randal trying to pass a yo-momma joke as original humor, I now see it as a failed emulation of Hark a Vagrant's mockery of historical figures.

Let me tell you a joke:A man walks up to another guy and says: "Did you know that three Brazilian soldiers died in the war on terror yesterday?"The guy says: "Oh dear, that is truly horrible. We should have national day of mourning."The man is shocked at how much emotion the guy is showing. Normally, the guy is quite placid."Oh and by the way" says the guy "How much is a Brazilian."Oh yeah, and the guy is George Bush.

As you can see, the joke falls flat on its face if you introduce the caricature after you tell the joke. If Randall had introduced Douglas before the yo-momma joke, the comic would at least be vaguely funny.

All I can say to that is that how funny something is is largely dependent on the person viewing it. If my first post is unable to show you why the comic was funny (or at the very least, was found funny by some people), then I can do little for you.

Obviously it's found funny be SOME people. You just haven't demonstrated that those people are anything but mouth-breathing idiots, conditioned to like XKCD through a combination of rampant habitual conditioning and rampant pandering.

I'd typed up a lot more about intersubjective valuations of art, the possibility of aesthetic judgments on "purely subjective" qualities and primary/secondary qualities, but I suppose if you're not a liberal arts major, you wouldn't understand...

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this (don't see any comments mentioning it), but in the original, the line is "fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers...etc. etc", which means stick-douglas just replaced "fathers" with "mom". either that's the point of the comic, or the your-mom joke is even more hugely sucky and unfunny.

Hey, I hope that you were kidding when you wrote "Oh and fun fact randall, I know you said your joke is innaccurate but I would remiss if I did not point out that indeed its premise is also inaccurate; the Lincoln-Douglas debates were held in 1858 and were for Illinois's Senate election, an election which Douglas won, not lost. JUST SAYIN."

Also, you anticipated the right criticism of your attack on the 'your mom' joke, but you seem to have misunderstood how it applies - the fact that it's a particularly lame your mom joke is irrelevant. The reason the joke is that his skills entered a rapid decline is that he made a 'your mom' joke AT ALL.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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